In some industries, document management may be necessary to organize large volumes of documents that include content supporting facts associated with various issues. Such industries can include, for example, the legal industry, engineering, research and development, journalism, and education. A conventional document management system may provide a way to catalog documents, manage version control of the documents, and/or archive documents. For example, in the legal industry, a conventional document management system may store documents obtained during discovery and may provide functionality to legal practitioners to search the documents based on their content, author, or date of creation, custodian, and the like. Some conventional document management systems allow users to provide notes or comments regarding the documents or to mark the documents as belonging to a category. For example, in the journalism industry, a user may be able to provide a summary of a document and mark the document as relating to an issue (e.g., government spending) or associated with a confidential source (e.g., Deep Throat).
In conventional document management systems, documents are generally stored in their original or native formats. Some conventional document management systems may provide document viewers where an image of the document may be available without opening the original or native format of the document. In some conventional document management systems, a user can annotate a document by checking the document out of the system, opening the document in an application configured to edit the document (e.g., opening a .doc file in MICROSOFT WORD), and checking the document back into the system. In such systems, the annotations become integrated with the document and are generally not separable without individual modification of each document. The disclosure made herein is presented with respect to these and other considerations.
In other conventional document management systems, users can annotate images of the documents, but these annotations are not linked or associated with content of the document. For example, a user may be able to annotate portions of a document by highlighting a portion of the document's corresponding image in the conventional document management system's viewer, but the content that is the subject of the annotation is not extracted or linked to the original or native document. In addition, the annotation is not linked to the location in the original or native document corresponding to the annotated portion of the image.
Providing functionality for a conventional document management system may include several technical challenges. For example, each document managed by the document management system may be of a different type with proprietary structures and encoding. When conventional document management systems provide a common document viewer, the different formats may require extensive processing leading to slower response time and extensive consumption of resources such as CPU cycles, memory, power, and the like.